


That Hunger I See In Your Eyes, Is It For Me?

by sinfuldesire_archivist



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-21
Updated: 2012-08-21
Packaged: 2018-09-03 10:43:30
Rating: Teen & Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8709295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinfuldesire_archivist/pseuds/sinfuldesire_archivist
Summary: Words: autumn; sleeping; hungry.  If there was one thing everyone said about Dean Winchester, it was that he was always eating.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Note from the Sinful Desire archivists: this story was originally archived at [Sinful-Desire.org](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Sinful_Desire). To preserve the archive, we began importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in November 2016. We e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact us using the e-mail address on [Sinful Desire collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/sinfuldesire/profile).
> 
>  **Author's notes:** Just me having a play around with their characters. I originally intended to focus mainly on Sam, but then Dean kicked me in the head and demanded that I pay him more attention. This is what happens when I start writing at 1am and keep at it until 4...
> 
> Spoilers for Pilot only.

.

 

If there was one thing everyone said about Dean Winchester, it was that he was always eating. Whether it was a hotdog or a bacon cheeseburger or a packet of raisins, he always had something edible in his hands. The one thing everyone said about Sam? That he was never hungry.

 

The odd thing was, people seemed to think that these things were different. The brothers knew better.

 

Dean didn’t eat because he was hungry. He ate because he was nervous. He liked having something to do with his hands and he knew that he would appear more confident to someone they needed information out of sliding a tiny sausage off a cocktail stick with his teeth than running his sweaty palms over his denim-clad thighs. Sam understood this, because he felt the same way. He also envied Dean his ability to eat under pressure, and such crap, too. Sam couldn’t even stomach the light salads he forced himself to eat most of the time, although he had to admit that Dean’s teasing made it slightly easier.

 

What Sam didn’t know was that the only reason Dean refused to join him and his light salads was that he liked the attention Sam felt compelled to pay him in order to give him hell for eating shit. And if he gave Sam a little hell himself for his girly obsession with healthy eating, well, he had a reputation to uphold.

 

So, popular to contrary belief, neither of John Winchester’s sons were ever hungry. Not for food, anyway.

 

Sam was hungry for freedom. Ever since he was four years old and his father had told him that no, he couldn’t go outside and play with the other kids or even with Dean, he’d been starving for it. He’d always thought that it would get better as he got older, but it didn’t. Even as Dean was being encouraged to go to bars and invited out on hunts with their dad, Sam was being forbidden to go outside or even answer the phone. When John reminded a fourteen-year-old Sam not to talk to strangers as he left for school – walking by himself for the first time because Dean had sprained his ankle and Dad was busy – Sam started to dream of getting away. Permanently. And when he realised he was hungering for something else, something sick and twisted and sinful that he must always keep hidden, he started to think that maybe he couldn’t get away fast enough.

 

What Dean hungered for was also something to keep hidden. He couldn’t even acknowledge it to himself without feeling cold licks of shame at the bottom of his spine. But he hungered nonetheless. He hungered for affection. 

 

At one point, he’d thought that he might have been able to settle for pride from his father, but even that he knew he was never going to get. With John, it was always ‘do this’, ‘do that’, ‘come on, you can do better than that’, and, above all else, ‘watch out for Sammy. You take your eyes off him for one second and I’ll tan your ass, boy’. John burned with his passion for avenging his wife’s death and keeping his boys safe, but when it came to affection of any kind, he was cold as ice. It wasn’t like he was any different with Sam – although at least he got the occasional hair-ruffle that Dean pretended he’d hate if he was in Sam’s place. But Sam deserved affection far more than Dean did, so Dean resolved to give Sam all he had. In the dark, when he felt sheltered and protected enough to expose his weaknesses, Dean would swallow half a box of Sam’s raisins and dedicate a few hours before bed to kind words, light touches on shoulders, brief claspings of fingers and hell, even hugs – anything to make sure his brother knew that he was loved. Sam returned the favour in spades, of course – he had such a kind, loving soul – but even though he loved it, relished it, in the harsh light of day Dean rejected it, mocked him for it. He hated the look of hurt in his baby brother’s eyes, but it gave him cause to redouble his efforts when night came. Of course, eventually even that wasn’t enough. When Dean realised he was hungry for an entirely different kind of affection from Sam, one he could never ask for or bestow, he cut off all kind of physical contact between them. As much as he was hungry for affection, he’d rather starve than risk losing Sammy forever.

*****

The Winchesters were no strangers to nightmares, but out of all of them, Sam’s were the worst. As he got older, it was obvious that Sam dreamed about terrible things happening to his father and brother, and later about the few hunts he’d been involved in – but when he was younger, before he’d known anything about the things that went bump in the night and the measures their father took to stop them? Dean shuddered to think about what horrors his baby brother saw in his dreams.

 

Dean was six the first time he brought Sammy into his bed to protect him from a nightmare. He’d been getting up in the night to see to Sam for various things for quite a while, but the noises he made that night rocked Dean to his core and gave birth to a protective streak that only grew stronger with each passing night that he was woken by Sammy’s screams.

 

Sam never woke during his nightmares, but once Dean settled in next to him, an arm thrown across his body, he quieted down instantly and drifted into a more peaceful sleep. Even though he knew his dreams would remain undisturbed, Dean would card his fingers through Sam’s hair and watch over him ‘til morning. It was the one kind of affection that Dean truly hated to give, because his Sammy had to hurt before he could receive it.

*****

Dean loved the way Sam smelled. It was a comfort to him from the moment John had thrust a bundle of baby and blankets into his arms and told him to run. As he had sat against the Impala, watching the burning house and trying to ignore the clawing terror in his stomach that was demanding to know where his mommy was, that smell had soothed him. It had started to rain at some point, and Dean had realised that his brother’s scent was all around him. Held close on his daddy’s lap, clutching Sammy as tight as he dared, Dean had been lulled to sleep by the smell of autumn rain.

 

Since that night, autumn had held a special, if oxymoronic place in Dean’s heart. November was, understandably, a shitty month, but the year that Sam turned sixteen, September became his favourite. He’d been putting Sam off since May, when he’d let him have a few too many beers for his birthday. Sam had been drunk enough to come onto him but sober enough to notice how hard Dean was while telling him ‘no’ and he hadn’t let it drop since. Dean had continued to resist, scared that Sam didn’t really know what he was asking for, and had remained steadfast in his resolve until that September afternoon.

 

John was off on a hunt, having left Dean at home to rest after the one they’d returned from only the night before. It had rained that morning, and the smell of Sammy hung heavy in the air. Dean was tired, and Sam was persistent and gorgeous and so damn sure, and Dean couldn’t find the strength to refuse him anymore. For the first time since he had realised what a sick fuck he had become, Dean fell asleep curled around Sam.

 

It was also autumn the night Sam broke the news – that he was applying to go to Stanford the following year. It turned out that after a year of giving and receiving all the affection that Dean had ever craved, it still wasn’t enough – _he_ wasn’t enough. Sam still hungered for freedom, and Dean felt his heart break a little more with each word out of Sam’s mouth. He made love to Sam twice that night. The first time was rough and unforgiving, verging even on punishing – the second time was slow and sweet, filled with soft sighs and whispered ‘I love you’s. That was the only way Dean let it show that Sam’s revelation had affected him. After that, things went back to normal. It might kill him to do it, but if it was what Sam needed, Dean would let him go.

 

Once they started fucking, Sam stopped having nightmares. Sam had wanted them to sleep together, in all senses, and Dean wasn’t going to turn down an opportunity to spend whole nights wrapped around his brother after such a long period of self-enforced separation, so they had squashed themselves into one of the queen-sized beds and had discovered that Dean’s constant presence throughout the night kept Sam’s bad dreams at bay.

 

It came as a surprise, therefore, when Dean was woken in the middle of the night by Sam’s cries. His brother was thrashing in his arms, alternate whimpers and screams falling from his lips, and the whole bed was drenched in his sweat. No matter what Dean did he could not calm Sam that night, and five minutes and an elbow to the face later, he had no choice but to shake him awake. Sam jack-knifed into a sitting position, his eyes wide and his breath coming in harsh pants. Neither brother moved for long moments, both held in some kind of stasis, before Sam turned in Dean’s arms and sobbed into his neck until morning. Later that day, Dean drove Sam to the bus station and Sam left for Stanford.

*****

Dean kept the phone against his ear long after Sam had hung up, trying to get his shit together. It had been a month since Sam had left and the first time he’d called, oozing with excitement and enthusiasm and the freedom he’d hungered for for so long. He hadn’t mentioned Dad, or even acknowledged _them_ ; he’d barely managed a hasty ‘me too’ in response to Dean’s parting ‘I love you’ before the call ended. Dean felt himself break under the pressure of Sam’s pointed, too loud silence.

 

When he finally released his grip on the phone, he registered the sound of rain outside. He spent a good few minutes forcing the crappy motel’s window open, suddenly desperate to smell Sam, and then he stripped down to his boxers and crawled back into bed. That night, after a whole month without him, Dean finally realised that he couldn’t sleep without his brother by his side anymore.

 

It was October when John went missing. Just up and left on a hunt without so much as a goodbye and then didn’t come back. Dean waited a few days before realising that he would have to go looking for him, and deciding that he couldn’t do it alone. He’d been alone for too long.

 

So he drove all night and then all day, the sound of autumn rain drumming comfortingly against the roof of the Impala his only company. He had no idea what he would find when he got to Stanford, but he drove as fast as he dared all the same, hoping with his very soul that Sammy would welcome him, and that he might finally be able to get some sleep.


End file.
